The Brief for This Bodega Bay Cabin? She Let Ancient Poems and Parables Explain It

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Project Details:

Location: Bodega Bay, California

Architect: Schwartz and Architecture / @schwartzandarchitecture

Footprint: 730 square feet

Builder: Fairweather & Associates

Structural Engineer: MKM & Associates

Civil Engineer: Hogan Land Services

Photographer: Bruce Damonte / @brucedamonte

From the Architect: "For almost nine years, we have been helping our client, Qing, build a 730-square-foot cottage on the water in Bodega Bay, California, the foggy coastal village where Alfred Hitchcock filmed The Birds in 1963. Over the years, at the most unexpected times, we began to receive parables and poems from Qing, snippets from her writings: ‘The Chronicles of Mrs. Old Fool Woman Building a House by the Sea.’

"Without these texts, I might have little understanding of why a middle-aged Chinese doctor from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada (with an unseen and unheard older husband who, in her words, would likely never see the home completed) would buy an address on the coastal highway whose size is better described in vertical feet of drop than square feet of land or how and why she found us.

"One day early on, a story arrived in my inbox from Qing with no explanation. She shared the legend of ‘Mr. Fool Moves the Mountains,’ a Chinese parable from the fourth century BC. It is an oft-repeated tale of perseverance in the face of unimagined odds.

"As the story goes, north of the Taihang and Wangwu mountains, a ninety-year-old man named Yu Gong was frustrated that the two mountains isolated his family from the rest of the world, and one day he decided to level the obstacles by opening a road past them directly to Yuzhou. The old man’s family all enthusiastically agreed, except for Yu Gong’s wife: ‘You don’t even have strength to move a little hill; how can you possibly level mountains?’

"Even so, Yu Gong, along with his children and grandchildren, dug away—slowly dragging the stones once a year to the Bohai Sea. A wise old man living by the Yellow River mocked Yu Gong: ‘You foolish old man, even with all your strength, you can’t move a single corner of the mountain!’ Yu Gong sighed: ‘You will never understand. Even if I die trying, I have my sons, my grandsons, and my great-grandsons; they and theirs will continue the lineage of diggers!’

"The guardian spirits of the mountains—awed by the foolish old man’s perseverance—reported the matter to the Heavenly Emperor, who, praising Yu Gong’s spirit, ordered the gods to just carry the two mountains away. With this parable in mind, I began to understand Qing—and became a believer in her quixotic quest. Over the years, more parables and poems would arrive, always unsolicited and unexplained. Slowly, we began to piece together the story of Qing and how she came to us. Her writing inspired and buoyed us. It also somehow expresses everything about why we do what we do."